Spare, Austin Osman

Spare, Austin Osman (1888–1956) English artist and magician, known for his strange and sometimes frightening art. Austin Osman Spare was called a genius in art, but he turned away from a conventional artist’s career to create images of Demons and atavisms, spirits raised up from deep levels of consciousness.

Spare was born on December 31, 1888, in London; his father was a City of London policeman. He left school at age 13 and worked for a time in a stained-glass factory. He obtained a scholarship to the royal College of Art in kensington and enjoyed success as an artist by 1909.

The seeds for Spare’s occult life were sown early in childhood. Alienated from his mother by age 16, he gravitated toward a mysterious older woman named mrs. Margaret Paterson. They met in 1902 when Paterson was working as a fortune-teller in London. She claimed to be a hereditary witch descended from a line of Salem witches who escaped execution during the witch trials in 1692, which was unlikely. Spare called her his “witch-mother.” Later, he said that she possessed great skill in Divination and had the ability to materialize spirits and her thoughts at will for long periods of time. According to Spare, Paterson would sometimes mentally project visions of the future that she saw for clients. The visions would be visible in a dark corner of the room. He said they always came true.

Spare said Paterson could change her shape from an old woman to a beautiful, seductive young woman. He did nude paintings of her in both guises. (See metamorphosis.)

Paterson taught Spare how to visualize and evoke spirits and elementAls and how to reify his dream imagery. She also initiated Spare in a witches’ sabbat, which he described as taking place in another dimension, where cities were constructed of an unearthly geometry. Spare said he attended such sabbats several times.

Under further tutelage of mrs. Paterson on the Magic of sigils, Spare developed his own system of magic, based heavily on will and sex—his own sex drive was quite intense—and the works of Aleister Crowley.

Spare believed that the power of will is capable of fulfilling any deeply held desire. The formula, simpler than ceremonial magic, was in his unpublished grImoIre, The Book of the Living Word of Zos. The formula called for creating sigils or Talismans in an “alphabet of desire.” The desire is written down in full. repeating letters are crossed out and the remaining letters are combined into a sigil like a sort of monogram. The sigil is impressed upon the subconscious by staring at it. The original desire is then let go so that the “god within” can work undisturbed toward the desired end.

According to one story, Spare once told a friend he would conjure freshly cut roses to fall from the air. His magic involved creating some symbolic drawings, which he waved in the air while repeating “roses.” He got results, but they were unexpected—the plumbing in the room overhead burst, and Spare and his friend were dowsed by sewage.

In his strange art, Spare is best known for his atavisms, the reifying of primal forces from previous existences, drawn from the deepest layers of the human mind. This too was a product of his education from Paterson. According to another story, one of his atavisms caused the suicide of one witness and the insanity of another.

Despite his ability to paint the spirits and images he saw, Spare was occasionally at a loss for words to describe some of his more bizarre experiences. Some of his visions put him into a place that he was able only to describe as “spaces beyond space.” He said he was never able to duplicate Paterson’s exceptional ability to manifest.

Spare spent most of his life as a recluse, living in poverty in London. He was remote and detached, preferring the company of his cats to that of human beings. He is considered a source of modern chaos magic.

In 1941, during World War II, his studio received a direct bomb hit and was destroyed. Spare was severely injured. He was paralyzed on his right side and lost the use of both arms. Within six months, he had regained the use of his right arm, and he resumed his art. For the rest of his life, he struggled with physical impairment and failing health, yet enjoyed one of his best periods as an artist.

In 1956, Spare was contacted by Gerald B. Gardner for his help in a magical war with kenneth Grant, a protégé of Crowley’s. Gardner believed that Grant was stealing his witches for his own New Isis Lodge, and he decided to launch a magical attack on him and reclaim his witches. In particular, Gardner wanted back a self-proclaimed “water-witch” named Clanda. It was the last year of Spare’s life, and by then he was living in dire poverty and obscurity, eking out a living by painting portraits in local pubs.

Using his “alphabet of desire,” Spare created a talisman for Gardner that would “restore lost property to its rightful place,” which Spare himself described as “a sort of amphibious owl with the wings of a bat and talons of an eagle.” Gardner did not give Spare specific information as to the exact nature of the “lost property”; he knew that Spare and Grant were on friendly terms.

During a Black Isis rite at the New Isis Temple, Clanda experienced the apparent negative effects of the talisman. Her role was to lie passively on the altar. Instead she sat up, sweating and with a hypnotized and glazed look in her eyes. She behaved as though in the grip of terror, convulsing and shuddering. Later she described what she experienced: the appearance of a huge bird that gripped her in its talons and carried her off into the night. She struggled and broke free, falling back onto the altar. The attending magicians saw none of this, but they did hear what sounded like the talons of a large bird scrabbling against the wind, and they felt a cold wind rush about the room. Talon marks were found on the window frame, and the windowsill was covered with a strange, gelatinous substance that seemed to breathe on its own. A strong odor of the sea permeated the temple for days.

Clanda did not return to Gardner. Instead, she moved to New Zealand, where she later drowned.

Spare died on may 15, 1956, in a London hospital. Some of Spare’s work appears in two quarterly art review magazines he edited, Form and Golden Hind. He wrote three books that were published: The Book of Pleasure (Self-love), the Psychology of Ecstasy (1913), and The Focus of Life (1921), both of which dealt with his magic system, and A Book of Automatic Drawing, published posthumously in 1972.

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